Re: Proposed: QS/QE macros for quotation in man(7)

[Douglas McIlroy]

> * People may discover that quotation marks are properly available in
>   the man(7) language, a fact that has been obscure for 45 years.  (The
>   `\*(lq` and `\*(rq` syntax has been available since day one [1979].  I
>   suspect these failed because man page authors who weren't already
>   practiced in *roff had no idea what a *roff string was, or how to
>   interpolate one, and the elaborate syntax filled them with fear.)

As the guy who added .RB, .TP. etc. to v7 -man,
I don't think of myself as one "who [wasn't] already
practiced in *roff". As the editor of v7 volume 1, I
wrote the man(7) page, which didn't exist in earlier
editions. (The man macros had been so simple that
s.tmac [sic] served as its own documentation.) The
new man page documented just two strings, neither
of which exists in groff tmac.s. If \*(lq and \*(rq were
in fact defined, ignorance of them should be blamed
on the editor's oversight, not on other authors'
unfamiliarity with *roff.

As for the issue at hand, habits and intents for the
placement of quotes relative to adjacent punctuation
are so idiosyncratic that a pair of macros can serve
only in the simplest case. As if the choice among
keyboard quote mark, \[lq] and \*[lq] were not vexing
enough, the proposal adds another alternative. It
may rope in \c as well.  So I question its justifiability.

The longer the -man man page gets, the less it will
be heeded.

That said, I do prefer macro calls to backslash escapes
embedded in text. I just think that the present proposal
is insufficient to the task. And \c is the nail in the coffin.

Doug